Stephen Green posts at Instapundit a link to a retrospective in honor of the 60th birthday of the BASIC programming language. The name is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was one of the first user-friendly programming languages.
Believe it or not there are a few programs written in BASIC still running, doing the job for which they were designed. But that's not why I'm noting this milestone.
The birthday of BASIC reminds me of my late friend Earl C. He was an older colleague on the faculty where I spent most of my academic career, an interesting guy, and a great exponent of BASIC.
He tinkered with cars, ran a carburetor repair shop, did a hitch in the Navy, taught at several schools with his business doctorate, and learned computers somewhere along the way. When I met him I was young, he was middle aged, and taught business school students about computing. He was a believer in BASIC although it was already somewhat old fashioned, and insisted his students learn it.
Earl loved cars and especially street rods, loved combining bits and pieces from several cars to make something uniquely his. For example he had a 1930s Graham into which he'd shoehorned a V-8, new drive train and A/C. The interior was fancy and the exterior shiny. He also wedged a small block V-8 into an MG-A coupe, and had an Olds Toronado.
Long before I retired, he left CA and moved to CT where he taught at Quinnipiac for several years, then moved again to Black Hills State in SD and taught some more. Driving around the US in our RV, the other DrC and I visited him in CT and again in SD.
He outlived his first wife, married again and moved to FL in retirement. He lived all over the US, worked in industry, built street rods, taught a ton of students computing, and was a good friend. And by the way, Earl was right - BASIC had (and to some degree still has) legs.
